Tag Archives: Dick Cheney

The unluckiest person in the world

If you’ve ever wondered who the unluckiest person in the world is, I think I’ve found him. His name is Abdul Rahim.

In January 2000, he was arrested in Afghanistan by the Taliban. They tortured him. They burned him with cigarettes, smashed his hand, deprived him of sleep, submitted him to water torture, and hanged him from the ceiling. Eventually he “confessed” to being a spy for the United States.

The prison Rahim was being tortured in was captured by US forces in January 2002. Given the circumstances, he probably thought it was his lucky day. He was wrong. The US promptly accused him of being an al-Qaida terrorist—and tortured him. Again.

He’s currently in Guantanamo Bay, one of the many people kept imprisoned without any actual criminal charges being filed against them.

Since Dick Cheney and friends are happy with holding people’s heads under water in order to extract information—they just argue that it shouldn’t be called torture—I imagine Abdul Rahim is pretty used to water torture by now.

Business ethics, Part 1

Thank you, Bush administration. I’ve just been required to spend the most mind-numbing couple of hours carefully reading page after page of ethical guidelines. Rules that should be blatantly obvious to anyone with any ethical sense whatsoever. It’s all about ensuring that I don’t do things like take Dick Cheney out to the Country Club in order to get juicy government contracts on a no-bid basis, or organize a price-fixing system to defraud California.

Apparently some government agencies no longer allow their employees to accept any free food or drink from contractors. There’s a written notice I have to make sure is displayed before I offer any government employee coffee or a doughnut. If I’d known public officials were that cheap…

Much as I appreciate the problem, I can’t help despairing of a world where there’s a need to tell people “You are prohibited from engaging in fraud”. The course material even then goes on to define the term, enumerating examples. Perhaps at some point someone said “What, false invoices are fraud? Fraud isn’t allowed? Nobody told me!”

Family values

You may remember from the November elections that Alan Keyes criticized Dick Cheney’s daughter, saying:

“If we embrace homosexuality as a proper basis for marriage, we are saying that it’s possible to have a marriage state that in principal excludes procreation and is based simply on the premise of selfish hedonism.”

Keyes later said that if he had a lesbian daughter, he would love her, but would have to tell her she was sinning.

Well, it turned out that Keyes did have a lesbian daughter, his daughter Maya, who had put off going to college in order to work for his re-election campaign.

Unfortunately for Maya, as of 2005 her father no longer needs her to appear smiling in publicity photos—so last month he fired her, kicked her out of the apartment she was living in (that he owns), and apparently let her know that she wasn’t welcome in the family home either.

And now she’s getting e-mail from right wing nuts telling her she deserves it.

Rebuilding Iraq

A few days ago I was being all cynical and saying that we’d fail to build Iraq, just like we’ve failed to rebuild Afghanistan.

I was wrong, though. They’ve already sorted out the contract to rebuild any destroyed Iraqi oil fields. The winning company is Kellogg Brown Root. By an amazing coincidence, they’re owned by Halliburton, Dick Cheney’s old company.

In Case You Missed It

Time for another boring little news summary, culled from diverse mainstream media outlets, with links to sources…

Dick Cheney is being sued for possible involvement in accounting fraud while running Halliburton. The company is also being investigated by the SEC. Meanwhile, Halliburton has just won the contract to provide the support services for the US military in Afghanistan.

Halliburton took part in Energy Task Force discussions about building an oil pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan and Pakistan, to Dabhol in India, to allow the tapping of the Central Asian oil reserves. The pipeline construction was to be handled by a company called UNOCAL, also a member of the Energy Task Force. A third company in the task force was Enron, who just happened to have a power plant in Dabhol. [PDF]

UNOCAL began negotiating the pipeline construction. Pakistan was no problem, but Afghanistan wouldn’t play ball. When the Taliban made the mistake of supporting Osama bin Laden’s attack on the WTC, it became clear that there was a much easier way of getting the pipeline built: bomb Afghanistan, and install some friendly warlords as the new government. It seems to have worked—the new regime wants UNOCAL to start building the pipeline this year. Naturally it’s pure coincidence that Bush’s special envoy to Afghanistan is Zalmay Khalilzad, who was special advisor to UNOCAL in 1997 and carried out the risk assessments for the Afghanistan pipeline project—along with colleague Hamid Karzai, who is now interim president of Afghanistan.

We still don’t know exactly what Enron, UNOCAL and Halliburton discussed with Dick Cheney. Initially Cheney refused to hand over the meeting notes. After a subpoena, it was agreed to release some documents—but only if guarantees were given that their contents would not be made public. Why is it so important to protect the confidentiality of advice given by a bankrupt company that no longer exists? We might have found out from Enron Vice Chairman and whistleblower J. Clifford Baxter—but sadly, he was found in his car, dead from a gunshot wound. A suicide note was found near his body. Also, he’d made sure to still have his defunct Enron corporate ID in his wallet, even though he’d resigned five months previously, perhaps in case the people finding him might fail to realize who he was. Police have concluded that he went out for a drive to shoot himself. It’s a little curious that a suicidal man had talked about needing a bodyguard just two days earlier, but no doubt he was feeling confused. An autopsy uncovered chemical traces on Baxter’s left hand consistent with his having fired the gun, and concluded that he died from the bullet wound to his right temple. Toxicology results revealed residual traces of a cocktail of sedatives, antidepressants and and painkillers in his body. So, nothing suspicious there.

A second oil executive committed suicide last month. Charles Dana Rice was senior vice president at El Paso Corp. El Paso has worked with UNOCAL on pipeline projects. Probably just another coincidence.